


flowers

by aparticularbandit



Category: Jane the Virgin (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, i wanted this to be fluff, it became angst, it started out meant to be fluff, why do so many of my one-shots revolve around angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 00:30:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17777135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aparticularbandit/pseuds/aparticularbandit
Summary: luisa doesn’t think of herself as a sunflower.rose doesn’t either.luisa is the sun.  of course rose would bend towards her.  any true flower would.





	flowers

**Author's Note:**

> i know this is still a little bit early for valentine's day, but this is what was meant as the valentine's day fluff.
> 
> sorry it's early and also not fluff.

the first time she receives sunflowers for valentine’s day instead of roses, she is thirteen years old.  
  
her grandmother knows, despite her loud proclamations, that daises are _not_ her favorite flower, even if they are the friendliest.  it’s the huge golden orbs with the edible seeds that stand far above her head that are her favorite, the ones she’s spent time watering and weeding around and sometimes emulates, standing stock still in one of her brightly patterned dresses and hiding among the leaves, eyes closed and her face turned towards the sun.  she laughs when her little brother sprays her with the water hose the same way he sprays the flowers, face frozen first in shock at the cold, then she twirls beneath the spray before tickling him until he drops the hose, grabbing it for herself, and spraying him with glee.  
  
it’s the sunflowers she worries about at her grandmother’s funeral, when there are lilies and roses and what seems like millions of other flowers _but not her favorites_ – who will take care of them, now that she’s gone?  can she go back to her grandmother’s house?  can she make sure they’re safe?  but within a year, the sunflowers die, and despite her insistence that her father plant them at the home he names after the woman, they never quite take root.

* * *

 

her date tucks a carnation behind her ear when she takes her to prom, and while it isn’t a sunflower (she’s kept this to herself, which is odd considering how much she talks about what seems like everything but isn’t; there are secrets about herself she keeps tucked close to her chest – sometimes she wonders if she sees things that aren’t really there), it’s still a bright, sunshiny yellow instead of the rosy hues that she sees the others in their class wearing.  she loves this, the forethought to stand out, and she kisses her with liquor-stained lips to taste the whiskey on her tongue.

a sunflower rests on her bed when she finally returns, bright petals a little lilted, with a note from her father tucked beneath it.  she isn’t sure which she loves more – the note or her father’s remembrance of her favorite flower – and she keeps them both, the flower pressed and dried with the note in her keep-safe box.

* * *

 

they tell her once that sunflowers and roses don’t go together, but she says they’re liars.  the gold perfectly off-sets the deep red.

if you do it right.

* * *

 

some people think that it’s romantic to spread rose petals on their lover’s bed before sex, but luisa doesn’t really agree with that sentiment.  it's a nice thought, and it’s definitely better than whoever decided that doing the tango with a rose between her lips was a good idea – she’d spent too much time trying not to press the thorns into her lips and ended up with bloody pinpricks and a mouth so sore that even kissing hurt.  fortunately for her, they’d been able to get by – there are, after all, other things she can do that don’t involve her mouth (or she can lie back and let herself be taken care of by her partner – _or both_ ) – but she’d refused to do the thorny, bloody tango again for the pain of it.

actually, she _avoids_ roses for the most part.  there is something so stereotyped about them, and there are so many other, beautiful flowers that are passed by for the easy decision of _roses_ and _love_ and whatever it is the markets decided to push this season.  it means more to her if her partner decides to find something unique, _listens_ to her—

and it means more when she takes a chance on doing something new and innovative and her partner doesn’t condemn or hate her for it.

(using poison ivy, not knowing what it was at the time, was a bad idea, but the time they’d spent in the bathtub afterwards had been well worth the itch.)

they don’t sell other petals in bulk the way they do rose petals, other than potpourri, and as much as she _loves_ potpourri (especially around the holidays when it’s all cinnamon and nutmeg and gingerbread scented), it _crunches_ in a way that petals don’t.  there shouldn’t be any crunch like that during sex.

no.

_ew._

* * *

 

allison always goes for rose petals.  luisa gets tired of this quickly.  and they’re always a bright red.  no variation even in the color.  no white.  no cream.  no pink.  no yellow.  always red and always roses.

* * *

 

when the woman at the bar introduces herself as rose luisa is tired of roses and _of course_.  later on, she wonders if this is the universe playing a cruel joke on her.  she was tired of them, so of course this one is not meant for her, even if, finally, she wants one.

she doesn’t even want a bouquet.  just one.

* * *

 

luisa doesn’t mention sunflowers to rose but her father must have.  for four years, she finds a bouquet of mixed roses and sunflowers on her bed on valentine’s day.  sometimes this is a little bit creepy because at first she finds them nestled in-between the pillows of her bedroom at the house her father lives in but then she finds them on her own, private bed in the apartment to which she has the only key.

no.

not the _only_ key.

her landlord has one.  there’s another one buried under the planter of the sunflower she’s trying to grow just outside the door.  it’s not going well, the growing, because she has the opposite of a green thumb, but she’s trying anyway, watering it and watering it, and it’s possible that at this point the key beneath the planter is rusted from so much excess water pouring out on top of it, but she hasn’t checked for that key in…months, at least, and when she finally does check for it, the key has disappeared.

she must have overheard her.

eventually she gives her a key of her own.  sometimes she needs a place that isn’t where she lives with her father, and luisa works.  has a job.  works.  and just like rose has become the bush she can hide behind on the days when she feels like she can’t cling onto life any longer without something – _a drink_ – to take the edge off, she thinks that maybe she can be the sunflower reaching overhead and providing some shade when the sun is too hot to bear.

* * *

 

luisa doesn’t think of herself as a sunflower.

rose doesn’t either.

luisa is the sun.  of course rose would bend towards her.  any true flower would.

* * *

 

she’s thirteen when she receives her first sunflower for valentine’s day.  it’s surrounded by a bunch of other gifts, all roses of varying colors, although most of them are a deep blood red or a soft _rosy_ pink.  a few are cream, one or two are white, and her little brother has made sure to buy her a yellow one, just one, because he loves her and he knows she likes yellow flowers and the flower shop worker convinced him to buy a rose but could not talk him out of the color.

her grandmother has made sure that a bouquet of sunflowers is waiting for her on her bed.  nestled between her pillows. held in the hand of her trash raccoon stuffed animal, who is halfway beneath her faded lilac blanket.  eventually she will lose the raccoon somewhere on the road between her college and living through 9/11, and while she tries to keep the blanket, she leaves it behind for her brother so that whenever he wants her and she isn’t around he can bury himself beneath it and pretend that she is there holding him and keeping him safe from their father’s ever-present disappointment, something he will adamantly deny if he is ever asked about it later or if she ever brings it up (and this, at least, she knows to keep to herself).

but the sunflowers are lodged in her memory.  they are the first that she presses between the pages of her copy of _little women_ , read so many times that the pages are beginning to fall out.  she knows that so many people think of themselves as jo, but she knows better than to imagine herself like that.  she’s laurie, and she presses the flowers between the pages where he finally proposes to the march sister he will marry – not headstrong jo but amy, the painter who is so full of herself and her beauty that—

she presses the bouquet of roses and sunflowers there, too.  the first one.  by then she’s had to buy another copy of the book and sometimes she puts glasses on to read it, not because she needs them (although she _does_ – her eyesight has been slipping since she turned thirty and sleeping with contacts in is _bad for you_ ; she’s a medical doctor and of all the other things she vaguely remembers this is one that stands out in her mind) but because she likes the image.

when she planned to have kids she planned to read this story out loud to her daughter.  she planned to hold her close and read her a chapter at a time as a bedtime story and have her sitting, resting against her chest while she read.  and at halloween they’d dress up as the march family.  she planned to pull out the different flowers from among its pages and tell her just when and where and how and _why_ she’d kept these flowers.  she’d explain that her first sunflowers on valentine’s day were from her grandmother and she’d tell a story about her grandmother to go with the flowers and the chapter they’d read.

by the time she presses the roses and sunflowers where laurie proposes to amy and she accepts his proposal she knows she cannot have children.  she has _chosen_ that.  no child should turn out like she has.  like her mother has.  no child should have to live with the same fear she has.  it’s not that she does not want children; she does.  _desperately_.  but what she wants is not more important than the child.

her genes would ruin a child the same way her mother’s genes have ruined her.

she loves her mother.

there can be no more of them.

* * *

 

the story of the roses and the sunflowers is good for a painter.  maybe she will share it with one of rafael’s children someday – her niece or nephew or however many he ends up having from what remains of his sperm.  she hopes she isn’t expected to be part of it.  she’s afraid she’ll fuck it all up.

* * *

 

when she inevitably _does_ fuck it up, there are two bouquets waiting on her bed.  one of pure red roses and one of sunflowers.  there is no mixture between the two.

* * *

 

the first valentine’s day after meeting rose that there is no bouquet waiting on her she takes allison to…not vegas.  it _should_ have been vegas; that would be a better story.  if she even told the story.  with no children, who would she tell?  who would want to hear it?  certainly not rafael, newly cleared of his cancer and happily married to his wife.  not her father, who would only ever be disappointed that he hadn’t been able to see his little girl’s wedding or have the father-daughter dance with her.  not any of her stepmothers, past, present, or future.

she gets drunk.

she gets _really_ drunk.

allison doesn’t stop her because she convinces allison to drink, too.

they wake up the next morning with rings on their fingers and bright lights shining through the windows of the hotel room covered with rose petals and luisa barely makes it to the bathroom before she vomits in the toilet.  it isn’t the alcohol.  allison doesn’t hold her hair back.  she washes gunk out of it later.

* * *

 

when she finally tells her father that she’s married, roses and sunflowers find their way to the house she and allison buy together.  allison is ecstatic to see them.  they’re beautiful.

they’re beautiful.

luisa throws them in the trash while allison is at work and finds more of them at her office.

she separates the roses from the sunflowers and strips them of their thorns.

she tangos with a rose between her lips when she arrives to the house where her wife waits for her.

she covers their bed with the petals she tore from their stems.

* * *

 

_she loves me; she loves me not._

_she loves me; she loves me not._

_she loves me; she loves me not._

_she—_

* * *

 

sunflowers have more petals.

she goes through them trying to find an answer she likes.

she doesn’t like any of the answers.


End file.
